Streets of Dreams

Activists Preserving Affordable Housing

Inspiring portraits of grassroots activists in communities of color who are using a community land trust to preserve affordable housing and promote development without the displacement of longtime residents.

By combining community ownership of land with individual ownership of homes, the CLT gives communities a powerful way to shape and secure their future, while opening the door to affordable homeownership for low-income residents.

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This film traces the remarkable journey of New Communities, Inc. and the struggle for racial justice and economic empowerment among African Americans in southwest Georgia.
NCI was created in 1969 in Albany, Georgia by leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Congressman John Lewis, and Charles and Shirley Sherrod, to…

Three tenacious and visionary communities deliver the American dream of owning a home to low-income residents.
It has been over 40 years since leaders of the southern civil rights movement formed the first community land trust to secure access to land for African-Americans. This equitable and sustainable model of affordable…

On a Friday night after a long week at work, Calvin Davis joined his family in Southwest Washington, DC for an informal gathering. Still wearing scrubs from his job at Children's National Medical Center, Calvin caught up with an old friend while his two boys rode bikes around the block.…

In the midst of the economic meltdown, Gaining Ground explores the innovative, grassroots organizing efforts of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in Boston. DSNI was created 25 years ago when the community had been devastated by bank redlining, arson-for-profit and illegal dumping, and has become one of the preeminent…

Told by the activists and leaders who live and breathe this movement for justice, WHOSE STREETS? is an unflinching look at the Ferguson uprising. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown is killed by police and left lying in the street for hours, it marks a breaking point for the residents of…

This documentary shows that segregation has been as virulent and persistent in the North as in the South and that it too has resulted from deliberate public policies based in deep-rooted racial prejudice. The film uses the bitter struggle over equal housing rights in Yonkers, New York during the1980s to…

Filmed over a period of 20 years, 70 ACRES IN CHICAGO chronicles the demolition of Chicago's Cabrini Green public housing development, the clearing of an African-American community, and the building of mixed-income communities on the valuable land where Cabrini once stood. More than a specific portrait of a single housing…

Past and present collide in this powerful documentary about Faubourg Treme, the fabled New Orleans' neighborhood that gave birth to jazz, launched America's first black daily newspaper, and nurtured generations of African American activists.
Executive produced by Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Nelson, with commentary from renowned scholars John Hope Franklin…

In his 1944 study of the 'Negro Problem' in America, Gunnar Myrdal posed a simple, disturbing question: How can Americans espouse a belief in liberty, equality and equal opportunity while enabling openly racist Jim Crow practices against black citizens? American Denial uses 'the Myrdal question' to probe and expose the…

Distinguished historian John H. Bracey Jr. offers a provocative analysis of the devastating economic, political, and social effects of racism on white Americans. In a departure from analyses of racism that have focused primarily on white power and privilege, Bracey trains his focus on the high price that white people,…

This film examines Oakland's evolution through the eyes of social entrepreneurs determined that youth of color not be left on the sidelines as Silicon Valley spreads into the home of the second largest black community in California. Kalimah Priforce, whose first activism was a hunger strike at age eight, and…

Winner of the NY Loves Film Best Documentary Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, When I Came Home follows the struggles of Herold Noel, an Iraq war veteran who becomes homeless in New York City after returning from combat with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Focusing on Herold's struggle with the…